Category Archives: visit

Return visit to Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE)

On June 7 and 8, 2010 I visited the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE) for the second time in ten months. As with my last visit I went to discuss the BUTE-CEPS exchange program.

During this visit I met six people who have been involved in organizing different aspects of the exchange program. My host was Eszter Kiss, the Program Director of the Information Center for Engineering Programs in English (ICEPE). For UNH/CEPS students, staff and faculty, she is the Hungarian face of the exchange program. Eszter and I primarily talked about the fact that, starting in 2011, UNH ECE exchange students will spend the spring semester in Budapest. Other CEPS students will remain on the fall-in-Budapest schedule.

Eszter organized two meetings for me with BUTE leaders. The first one was with Dr. Peter Moson, Vice-Rector for International Relations (the Vice-Rector position at BUTE is equivalent to the Vice President position at a US university). Ildiko Varga, the head of the BUTE Erasmus and Exchange Office was also present at this meeting. Dr. Moson expressed his full support for a vibrant relationship between BUTE and CEPS. On a personal note it was great to see Dr. Moson who I met during his visit to UNH last year. It was also nice to talk to Ms. Varga who went to graduate school and taught mathematics at Purdue.

The second meeting organized by Eszter was with Dr. Gabor Stepan. Dr. Stepan, a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS), is the Dean of the BUTE Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, the ICEPE’s parent unit. Dr. Stepan expressed his full support for the BUTE-CEPS exchange program. Again on a personal note, it was exciting for me to visit the BUTE Faculty of ME where my father received his BS ME a long time ago. Dr. Stepan also spent some time telling me about BUTE’s history, including facts and anecdotes about BUTE’s Nobel-prize winning alumni.

While the meetings with Drs Stepan and Moson and with Ms. Varga primarily dealt with the overall BUTE-CEPS relationship, I also had a chance to work on issues related to UNH ECE directly with the BUTE unit that hosts ECE students. Specifically, Dr. Moson introduced me to Dr. Balint Kiss, the person in charge of the English language education at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics. This is the BUTE unit that hosts UNH ECE exchange students and Dr. Kiss will be my primary contact in determining courses for our students to take while at BUTE. The meeting with Dr. Kiss was also an opportunity to catch up with Dr. Peter Arato. Dr. Arato, who is also a HAS member, has strong ties to the UNH ECE department having collaborated extensively with UNH ECE professor Andrzej Rucinski.

In addition to all these productive meetings I had a chance to give a talk to BUTE students interested in the exchage program. Seven prospective students attended, several of them interested in coming to the UNH ECE department – I hope we’ll see them here soon.

I would like to thank Eszter Kiss for organizing my visit (on very short notice). I would also like to thank the BUTE faculty, staff and students who took time to meet with me. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the UNH ECE Department and the CEPS Dean’s office who jointly funded this visit.

For pictures about my trips to Budapest visit my Flickr page.

Visit to FTW, Vienna

On June 4, 2010 I visited the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (FTW). My host was Peter Froehlich, Senior Researcher in FTW’s User-Centered Interaction area of activity. Peter and I met at the CHI SIG meeting on automotive user interfaces [1] that I helped organize.

Peter and his colleagues are investigating automotive navigation aids and are currently preparing for an on-road study. I’m happy to report that this study will utilize one of our eye trackers. My visit provided an opportunity for us to discuss this upcoming study and how the eye tracker may be useful in evaluating the research hypotheses. Part of this discussion was a Telecommunications Forum talk I gave – see the slides below:

I want to thank Peter and his colleagues at FTW for hosting me and I’m looking forward to our upcoming collaboration. I also want to thank FTW for providing funding for my visit.

References

[1] Albrecht Schmidt, Anind L. Dey, Andrew L. Kun, Wolfgang Spiessl, “Automotive User Interfaces: Human Computer Interaction in the Car,” CHI 2010 Extended Abstracts

Albrecht Schmidt visit to UNH

Last month (April 16) Albrecht Schmidt visited UNH and the Project54 lab. Albrecht gave an excellent talk introducing some of the research problems in pervasive computing and specifically touching on the latest results from his lab, which were just published at CHI 2010 [1, 2]. I was especially interested in the work on helping users find the last place of interest on a map quickly. Albrecht and colleagues track the user’s gaze and when the user looks away, they place a marker (or gazemark) on the map. When the user looks back at the map she can start where she left off: at the place of the marker. Clearly this could be very useful when looking at GPS maps in a car. In such a situation the driver has to keep going back and forth between the map and the road and you want to minimize the time spent looking at the map (the road being the more important thing to look at!). The gazemarks introduced by Albrecht’s group may help. It would be interesting to conduct a driving simulator study with gazemarks.

After the talk Albrecht spent about an hour with students from the Project54 lab and those in my Ubicomp Fundamentals course. This was a more intimate setting for conversations about Albrecht’s research. Finally, Project54 staff and students spent a couple of hours discussing Project54 research with Albrecht – our work on handheld computers, on driving simulator-based investigations of in-car user interfaces and our budding efforts in multi-touch table interaction.

I am grateful to the UNH Provost’s Office for helping to fund Albrecht’s visit through a grant from the Class of 1954 Academic Enrichment Fund.

References

[1] Dagmar Kern, P. Marshall and Albrecht Schmidt, ” Gazemarks: gaze-based visual placeholders to ease attention switching,” CHI 2010

[2] Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Ari-Heikki Sarjanoja, Florian Alt, Albrecht Schmidt, and Jonna Häkkilä, J. “Understanding the impact of abstracted audio preview of SMS,” CHI 2010

Visiting Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE)

After my trip to Automotive UI 2009 I flew to Budapest, Hungary. The UNH College of Engineering and Physical Sciences has an exchange program with BUTE and I went to promote this program to BUTE students. I also got a chance to meet two people responsible for implementing the program “on the ground” in Budapest, Eszter Kiss and Máté Helfrich. Eszter is the person who looks after the UNH students (and many others from all over the world) from the time they arrive in Budapest, so I was very happy to meet her and express UNH’s gratitude for all of her efforts.

Eszter organized a talk in which I presented some of the reasons why a semester at UNH would be beneficial to BUTE students (see the slides). The discussion that followed my presentation was excellent, with students asking questions about many aspects of the exchange program, as well as a new summer internship program. The discussion was in Hungarian, which was fun, as I don’t use this language for work very much 🙂

You can see more pictures about my visit on Flickr.

Visiting MERL

Three weeks ago I visited Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Cambridge, MA. My hosts were Bret Hersham and his colleagues Garrett Weinberg and Bent Schmidt-Nielsen. The proximate reason for my visit was that one of my PhD students, Zeljko Medenica, worked under Bret as a summer intern.

As part of my visit I saw the MERL driving simulator, which is an excellent adaptation of a computer game for research purposes (read more about it in Garrett and Bret’s Automotive UI 2009 paper). I really like the driving courses that they can use (e.g. winding mountain roads and narrow village streets) and I’m impressed with the performance of the simulator’s chair which shakes and tilts.

After the simulator tour I gave a talk on our latest navigation study, which compared driving performance and visual attention when using two personal navigation aids: one that displays a map and provides spoken instructions and another that provides spoken instructions only. The talk was based on our Automotive UI 2009 paper.

Finally, I had a chance to talk to Fatih Porikli, who showed me some great videos of his work on recognizing pedestrians. We also discussed possible collaboration on learning grammars for using voice commands to tag photos. More about this in another post.